What was zimbardos hypothesis

For example, prisoners were stripped naked, forced to do menial tasks, and in many cases were deprived of their cots, meals, and bathroom privileges. After the attempted revolt and subsequent punishment, five prisoners began to experience extreme emotional reactions and were eventually released.

As the obedience tactics became more brutal and humiliating and prisoners displayed increasingly negative affectivity, Zimbardo eventually decided to end the study on the sixth day of what had been planned as a 2-week study. Zimbardo and colleagues construed the increasingly hostile behavior of the guards and increasingly passive behavior of the prisoners, each of which had started out as groups of normal young men, as evidence that the extreme nature of the prison situation breeds such volatile and desperate behavior.

Indeed, the SPE is often cited as evidence for the strong role of the situation over individuals in ways in which they often do not predict. Despite these exciting findings, the SPE has been criticized from both a methodological and ethical standpoint. Methodologically, critics have argued that participants of the SPE never fully accepted the situation as real and were merely playing the stereotypic roles of prisoners and guards.

In essence, it was argued that the results were driven by demand characteristics of the experimental situation. Regardless, evidence suggests that participants did internalize the situation, as well as their roles in the situation.

For instance, only one-tenth of the conversations between prisoners contained speech about life outside of the experiment. The SPE was likely more controversial from an ethical point of view.

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How did the guards break the solidarity of the prisoners? The effect was to break the solidarity among prisoners. The prisoners' rebellion also played an important role in producing greater solidarity among the guards. How do you test Nivomat shocks? How do I reset my key fob after replacing the battery? Co-authors 4.